A 946430
by dogsbody32
Summary: "Ranking top ten at Operations is worlds beyond good enough for a poor girl from the south side still counting lucky stars she won't bag groceries at Fairplay for the rest of recorded time." Maria Hill and ten years of S.H.I.E.L.D.
1. Chapter 1

_One: Make Sure That You are Sure of Everything I Do_

**S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy of Operations - May 2004**

The end of any graduating term at the Academy is like Draft Day, except it lasts for weeks and nobody gets a sports car at the end.

All the headhunters, and the headshrinkers, and the number-crunchers descend in full force to push, file, stamp, index, brief, debrief, rank, trade, pitch, poach, pull, prod, groom, and finally - unavoidably - _number_ the cadets.

Hill used to enjoy emptying a few clips on the range for relief. Now, there's a middle-aged cowboy for every fresh-faced shooter, criticizing stance and grouping and speed with every pull of the trigger, offering all of these suggestions while they're looking for the agent to snag for their strike team or hazardous field posting.

She's too fast. She's not fast enough. She's using the wrong kind of gun. She's standing Weaver when, they think, she should be standing Isosceles, never mind the rotator cuff issues inherited from one of the few injuries of her childhood which was a genuine accident.

Radley's the best of the worst, she thinks, a petrified stick propped against the rear wall, observing targeting exercises in mute contemplation. He watches as she pumps round after round through the paper. Sometimes he frowns. Sometimes he doesn't. Hard to say what either state of being means.

(Cadet Knopfler, with the oily wisdom of the eternal brown-noser, once confided to her after a session that he'd heard Radley was the section chief in Madripoor. "Poor bastard," he'd said, clicking his safety back on. She wished she'd just kept her headphones on until clearing the range.)

Garrett, now, most of the cadets seem to like Garrett. Texan, quick with a wink and a joke. A nickname for every cadet and a cadet for every nickname. She's seen the way a cadet like Morales, already all thumbs on the range, just locks up tighter when Garrett starts giving advice, and wonders.

Once, just one time, she'd like to shoot a frowny face into one of the targets at the far end of the range with a handgun and see what the cowboy-on-watch does then. She won't. Over the last three years, she's learned her particular flavor of she-supposes-you'd-call-it-whimsy is rarely appreciated here and is best kept under lock and key.

She's also afraid that kind of display might attract their attention. She's spent too many terms blazing a trail into Logistics - all the game-and-theory types - to find herself poached at the last second by a strike teamer looking for fresh dead meat.

Sometimes, the best defense is just to look unappealing to the offense.

* * *

Cadet Hill runs the track like she's chasing something.

Or like she's being chased by something.

That's what she imagines her instructors are thinking, anyway, as they watch her out here at two in the morning, burning up the rubber instead of sleeping. She has no illusions of privacy. The Bosses probably have eyes on the students every second of every cadet's day, from the second they wake up to the second they fall asleep.

Some of the cadets, they hop the proverbial fence and trek out into town looking to get drunk enough to screw, or screwed enough to drink. She's done her share of both, more than some, less than most. Jogging's what she does now when the lights are low and sleep isn't forthcoming.

The larger graduation's shadow has loomed over her, the more she's cut the shit and dedicated herself to doing the best she can with what she has to work with.

The result is high test scores, higher firearms proficiency, and highest physical fitness reports across the board. She's not the top dog, not exactly, but ranking top ten at Operations is worlds beyond good enough for a poor girl from the south side still counting lucky stars she won't bag groceries at Fairplay for the rest of recorded time.

Swansson has all but guaranteed her she's got her post in Logistics secured. Just so long as she doesn't skid out and burn on one of the last few exams, anyway.

So if she's chasing anything, it's the beat of "I Hope I Get It" from _A Chorus Line_, but there are things you tell people around here and things you don't.

As she rounds the last turn on the last lap, she spies the senior mentor they've paired her group off with for final advice-and-consent purposes, agent named Coulson, watching her from under one of the lamp posts.

Coulson. A little too milquetoast for some of the cadets in her group, the ones she suspects wish they were joining an organization called P.E.N.I.S. or B.A.L.L.S. instead of S.H.I.E.L.D. His unruffled, last-gentleman-in-the-company demeanor gives her hope that not all of her future colleagues are going to be so lost and damned.

It's probably false hope.

It's probably also false hope for her to think Coulson's easy-going nature means there's a chance she won't turn out the same as the rest of them.

"Cadet Hill," he says as she finishes mopping her face with a towel creatively liberated from the locker room for just this moment. (Anybody calls her on it, she was just practicing breach and entry skills.) "Another late night pounding pavement?"

_Again step kick kick leap kick touch_

"Just thinking, sir," she says.

_Again step kick kick leap kick touch_

She stops the mini-disc player strapped to one arm and pulls her earphones out, throws the works in her gym bag.

"Well, knock it off, would you? All that 'thinking' you're doing out here, you're making the rest of us look bad."

"Sorry, sir."

"That was a joke, Hill."

"I'm aware of that, sir." No, really. She was. "Why are you out on the track at this time of night, sir?"

"Looking for you, to be honest. You'd have saved me a lot of time if you'd just stayed in your dorm after hours like your roommate." Morales is a year behind Hill. She's even more monastic, but she's buckling under the weight more with each passing day. Some students, they seem to shine under pressure. Poor Morales is shredding like soft tissue.

Hill likes her. She's too honest for this place, and it shows in her every action, but it makes her better company than most of the others.

STEM scores like hers, she should have gone to Science & Technology.

You have to lie at least a little to get along in Operations.

You have to have something you want to lie about.

"So you're admitting you don't know where all cadets are at all times, sir?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny," he says. "And you can quit calling me 'sir'. I have a name, you know."

"Yes, sir. To Mr. and Mrs. Coulson, a son, Agent, was born."

"Was that an attempt at a joke, Hill?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny, sir."

He laughs, a little laugh, evidently in good spirits.

At least one of them is.

There's a cold wind blowing down the Rockies tonight, chilling her sweat, and she shivers despite the summer's relative warmth.

(And for a moment, for propriety's sake alone, she's also glad she pulled on a sports bra before heading out. This time of night, she's already not supposed to be out on the track talking with a superior officer, dripping sweat from every exposed inch of skin.)

"Do you trust me, cadet?"

"Less now than before you felt you had to ask me, sir."

"That's a good answer. You need to come with me. We have a lot to talk about."

"Now, sir?"

"Well, unless you'd rather stand there sweating."

"Come with you where, sir?"

"Aw, you can't just ask like that," he says, "and expect I'm going to tell you. That's like shaking your Christmas presents the night before to find out what's in them. It ruins the surprise. Are you the sort of person who shakes her Christmas presents the night before, Hill?"

"I never really got any Christmas presents," she says, and he laughs again, that little laugh, like she's joking.

Maybe it sounds like she is.

* * *

_Oh ho ho it's magic, you know_

Wherever it is Coulson's decided to take her, it's an hour's drive away in one of the academy's custom Denalis. It's a very long hour. Coulson's tapping the steering wheel and singing along to the compilation of AM Gold hits that seems to be superglued into the SUV's stereo.

_Never believe it's not so_

She'd complain, but she's a Broadway kind of girl. Having a soft spot for bell-bottomed cheese doesn't make Coulson a kindred spirit among the sea of stomping feet and shuddering machismo around here, but it almost makes him a kindred spirit.

The destination, as it happens, is some bar in what amounts to a rustic wooden shitbox so many rustic, shitbox towns away from campus she'd bet good money no S.H.I.E.L.D. cadet's ever been this way before.

Coors neon flashes in the window. Nothing says "undisclosed location" quite like being ninety miles down the road from one of the biggest breweries in America.

"If you wanted to buy me a drink, sir, you didn't have to go all this trouble," she says, unbuckling her seatbelt.

"Please," says Coulson. "Who do you think we work for? There's nothing but trouble to go to. Besides, I have a wife, and I wouldn't try to 'poach' cadets even if I didn't." He looks her in the eye. "And your record, you don't strike me as the sort to 'date' superior officers even if I were, either."

She doesn't bother to tell him he's right. He clearly already knows that. "So why are we here, then, sir?"

"If you want to get along in S.H.I.E.L.D., Hill, let me give you a dollar's worth of free advice. Sometimes, you just have to accept the mystery." He opens the car door and steps out. "Coming?"

* * *

She thought it looked bad from the outside.

The place is a goddamned strip club, and clearly the worst one in the area. She doesn't have to see any of the others to know this. Nobody would. From the holes in the wood paneling to the scars on the dancers – one's so old her C-section scar could probably be a paying customer – it's an empirical fact.

Coulson has his arm around her shoulder as he's guiding her to a table in the back. Which means he can feel her tense up. "You need to trust that I wouldn't bring you to a place like this without a really good reason. My wife's going to have my head for this as it is."

"And what reason could possibly be good enough to justify taking an academy cadet here, sir? You're violating fifteen separate codes of conduct, and those are just the ones they taught us."

"Maybe," says a man shrouded by shadow at the next table over, "Agent Coulson here's bending the rules to see if you can stomach the floor show."

"If a prospective agent sits through Candy's routine without running," says Coulson mildly, seating himself beside the other man, "then they'll never have to prove their courage any other way." He gestures to the other chair. "Sit down."

"Maria Hill." The other man leans back into shadow rather than forward into the light. "Born in Chicago, April 4, 1982. Never met your mother. Your father liked to push you around for that, 'til you got old enough to push him right back. You tell everybody they're _both_ dead. JROTC in school, mostly to piss off your old man, but you got good marks and high grades and it was enough to get you here. You've been angling for assignment to Logistics. Your performance is just about good enough to make that happen. Do I have that right, or am I leaving something out?"

"Close enough, sir," she says in a quieter voice. She wonders if the guy knows enough about her to know how angry she is right now. If he doesn't, she's thinking she could oblige him with a free demonstration of just how good the Academy's hand-to-hand classes are nowadays.

Mossad doesn't have shit on her.

"Sit down," he says.

"Director Fury means now, cadet," says Coulson. Just as friendly-sounding, but somehow the velvet glove's come off and the iron fist of a hardened field op is on full display.

So this is, it turns out, the story of how she meets Nick Fury. In a bargain basement strip club, uncounted miles of lonely mountain roads away from the Academy, still reeking of a late-night jog. She's got pit stains darkening the light gray of her S.H.I.E.L.D. t-shirt and she's taking a face to face meeting with the Director himself and one way or another, nothing's ever going to be the same again.

Nobody would believe this if she wanted to tell them about it, even if she could.

* * *

"What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for, Almost Agent Hill?" There's a mocking tone in Fury's voice, and she knows he's poking at her to see what he stirs up, but she still feels an irrational flash of hatred surge up her nerve endings.

"Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division," she says. "Sir."

"And what does that mean to you?"

"Before you answer," says Coulson, but he's cut off by Fury before another word.

"I know what you _think_ about all of this, Agent Coulson," says Fury. "That's why you're here. I want to know what the cadet, here, thinks. That's why she's here. When you're ready," he says. "Almost Agent."

A thousand options, from the glib to the flippant to the surly, pass through her mind. That's clearly not what Fury's looking for here. It's (probably) not what she really thinks. She closes her eyes, instead, blots out the flashing lights and undulating sights of the floor show of horror. Tries to tune out the rock song blaring from the PA system.

_And we'll all float on okay. And we'll all float on anyway._

Yeah, she thinks, and everything floats down here.

What a bunch of bullshit.

You don't float. You sink. Or you kick against the current until you learn to swim.

That's the S.H.I.E.L.D. she sees, sometimes.

Garrett, all folksy charm on the range but she's seen his eyes tighten just a little too much at the corners - just a little too much like her father - whenever he makes his little jokes at the expense of somebody's performance. All the just-funning-yas in the world can't make that right even if he really means them.

Morales, so good on paper, good enough to fly all the way here from a crowded bungalow in Santa Barbara, and so bad in practice. Falling behind. Poor shooting. Worse scores. Becoming the wrong kind of example, getting pulled under by the Garretts and nobody else seems to care.

Fury, dragging a cadet out to a civilian titty bar in the dead of night to ask her if she knows what the organization she's a part of means to her. He could have had this conversation on the campus or a thousand other places out of it. He chose this one because...

Because.

Because the way he's decided to ask her implies the answer he expects her to give.

And that gives her her answer.

Hill opens her eyes. "I don't like bullies," she finally says, and meets Fury's gaze directly for the first time all conversation.

Fury leans forward, and she gets her first real look at the man who might very well be her many-rungs-up-the-ladder boss in a week unless she fails what is increasingly starting to feel like some kind of security-black final exam.

His dark face is even darker in the club lights. He's impossible to read. "You don't like bullies? Is there more to that, or do you want me to guess?"

_Even if things get heavy we'll all float on alright_

"I misspoke, sir," she says, not looking away. "I _hate_ bullies."

"Oh," he says. "You _hate_ bullies. That's a useful clarification, don't you think, Agent Coulson?" Coulson shifts in his seat. She can't see him, but she can imagine him shrugging with that nonchalant, almost befuddled air he cultivates, playing good cop to Fury's asshole. "Why do you think that's relevant to S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

"Because we're not called S.W.O.R.D., sir," says Hill. The eye which doesn't see stares into her harder than the one which does. "We're not supposed to attack. A bully attacks. We're supposed to defend."

"Implying we don't," says Fury.

"Implying I don't really know what we do. You asked me what S.H.I.E.L.D. means to me. I gave you my answer," she says. "Sir," she says.

Fury makes a noise halfway between a grunt and an exhalation.

The song ends.

Something with a friskier beat starts.

Fury stares at her in full a second longer, taking - she assumes - her full measure as a human being and a trained cadet one week out from final assignment. She'd look away, oh god does she need to blink, but you don't live to be a matador by ignoring the bull. "Dismissed," he says. "Almost Agent Hill."

* * *

It's less magical and even easier to believe it's not so on the long ride back to campus.

Somewhere in the dark between towns, idling at a stop sign with no other drivers and no cops around, Coulson turns to face her. "Just so you know," he says, and she can feel his enthusiasm radiating from all the way over here in the passenger seat, "and it should go without saying, but that meeting back there? Never happened."

She throws him an unimpressed look, and goes back to contemplating the dark scenery outside her window as he speeds back up.

The Colorado sky's lightening from black to grey when Coulson finally turns the Denali onto the access road leading back to campus.

* * *

The Academy of Operations rises above the road, a sprawl of world-of-tomorrow hangars, domes, and white stone buildings tucked into a recessed valley in the Rockies. After Paperclip, S.S.R.-about-to-be-S.H.I.E.L.D. put all its shiny new ex-evil-empire scientists to work designing experimental aircraft here.

When the focus of the Cold War turned away from direct military adventurism, and S.H.I.E.L.D. expanded to meet the new paranoid style, the facility became a training center for future officers instead.

They're nearly to the front gate when Coulson speaks again. "Any exams today, Hill?" He wrestles his badge out of his breast pocket.

"One, sir."

"Sorry," he says, sheepish. "If we'd known - "

"You did."

"But _you_ didn't say anything."

"I didn't feel as if I had a choice, sir."

"There's always a choice, cadet." Coulson rolls the window down before the guard on duty can tap on it. He flashes his badge before the guard can speak. "You still didn't see us," he says. "We still weren't out here."

"See who, sir?"

"Good man, Tucker." Coulson rolls the window back up. The Denali goes back into gear. The two guards she can see both relax. The countermeasures she can't presumably go back into stasis, waiting to brown the pants of the next tourist who turns down the wrong mountain path and gets an eyeful. "Got to tell you," he says. "Being able to say all that cloak-and-dagger stuff? Hands down the coolest part of working for S.H.I.E.L.D."

She's not convinced, but her opinion's not really being asked for. Coulson drops her off in front of the dormitory - round like an oil filter, white stone and polarized glass all the way up six stories - just as the sun's burning through the early morning fog. "Remember," he says as she fumbles in her bag for her ID to swipe through. "This didn't happen."

The shower she takes is about five minutes, three longer than usual. When she gets back to the room, Morales is already sitting at the desk, nose deep in a text about operations history Hill remembers darkly from this time last year.

Later that afternoon, she passes her exam, wondering more now than before to what end, and on whose behalf, she's put in all of this effort.

* * *

Graduation comes, as graduation does. Cadets lined up in their dress blacks, eagle patches perched on their shoulders for the first time. Director Fury gives the commencement speech, a fact which would have been a lot more exciting before she met the man.

He spins terse yarn out of straw about secret wars and last lines of defense. It sounds thrilling, and exciting, like being here on this day is the first step in fulfilling a heroic, action-packed purpose in a dark, weird world.

If there's a right answer to the question he'd posed her, what he's telling the assembled cadets now sounds like its precise opposite to her. There's nothing good in this. There's no defense. There's just an endless life of explosive intrigue which sounds like a warhawk's thirty-year-old wet dream.

At one point, Fury's gaze finds her in the crowd. She stares back, impassive. If she passed his test, if she failed it, if she even had an idea what the test was supposed to really be about - that bull charged a week ago. If it's going to gore her, or if she's going to duck its horns, well, it's beyond her control now.

After, as the now-former cadets retreat to their dorms to pack up, or to prepare for the long night of cut-loose partying ahead, parties to which she wasn't seriously invited and wouldn't attend, she sneaks out behind the library with her assignment envelope and meditates upon what the immediate future's going to hold.

(The library, a squat white frame with a massive parabolic window, is a building most students only visit after all other alternatives have failed. Around here, other alternatives are destined to fail, which just means people take their rage out on the place. Right now, there is no better place to be alone.)

The fruit of three years' worth of unblinking, unbowed effort are contained within. As soon as she opens it, she's not a student anymore, not a cadet, not even a girl. She's a woman with a serious assignment doing serious things on behalf of the whole human race. This, really, is always what it's been about.

She slips a finger under the flap, tears the envelope open with ease.

The sheet of paper within is blank.

Nothing.

That's what she got: nothing.

That's certainly one way to send a message, she thinks, numb.

She stares out over the campus until the dress shoes start to hurt. The triumphal shouts and shrieks and screams of the just-graduated echo even this far out, and tomorrow morning they'll all be shipping out. Some attached to strike teams, some to branch offices, some even to New York and the almighty headquarters she'd so had her heart set on.

She listens to it until she can't stand to hear anymore.

When she gets back to the dorm, Morales is lying on her bed, asleep, a book of highly technical analyses of the famous battles of Vietnam laying open across her chest. (Hill's read that one, too. She cannot recommend the experience to anybody who wasn't stuck with Palmer's military history class and, thus, unavoidably saddled with the book.)

She sits down on the bed and closes her eyes. Just for a second.

Then she'll worry about what to -

* * *

Morales is lightly nudging her shoulder and repeating, "Wake up, Maria."

"Gina," she mutters. "What time is it?"

"8:30," says Morales. "You need to quit leaving your shoes in the middle of the floor. There was a knock on the door, and I almost tripped over them trying to answer it."

"Or you could turn a light on," says Hill, rolling herself into a seated position. She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. "And I didn't leave my shoes in the middle of the floor. I constructed an obstacle for you to, uh..." She swats the air with her hands. "Forget it. Who was at the door?"

"Some guy dropped off an envelope for you. So?"

"What guy?"

"I dunno. Suit. Sunglasses. Tie. Acts like an uncle. Looks like a dad. How'd you do?"

"Agent Coulson?"

"He didn't give me a name."

"You didn't ask?"

"Well, he didn't have anything for me. I didn't want to pry. So, how'd it go?"

"I have nothing to report," says Hill, pushing herself to her feet.

"I see how you are." Morales throws her arms up in not-entirely-mock aggravation. "You graduate. You get a cushy assignment. You forget all about the little people who had to put up with you and your annoying showtunes at all hours."

"I mean I have nothing to report." Hill fumbles around in the pocket of her now-rumpled dress jacket. Her fingers close around the crumpled sheet of blank paper and pulls it out. She hands it to Morales.

"This is blank."

"You," says Hill, rubbing her eyes, "are going to make some team leader a very happy supervisor one day. What envelope?"

"On the desk," says Morales, turning the blank sheet over in her hands. "Between the computer and the phone. Why is this blank? I thought you were set."

"Kissed too many of the wrong asses. Didn't kiss the right ones at all. Who knows?" Hill walks over to the desk. She finds a padded envelope addressed to "No-Longer-Almost Agent Hill" sandwiched between printed drafts of Morales's term papers, all covered with the other woman's nigh-indecipherable chicken scratch. "Do yourself a favor, Gina. Transfer out of this dump."

"And go where?"

"Science & Technology. Communications. Harvard. Stanford. University of Chicago. Anywhere." She turns it over in her hands. There's a hard lump inside. Way her day's going, somebody's probably decided to give her a hand grenade.

"And what about you?"

"There's always the Fairplay," Hill says, ripping the envelope open. Inside, there's a cell phone. When her hand touches it, it rings.

Hill looks at Morales. Morales looks at Hill. "This is nothing to do with me. I've gotta use it, anyway," says Morales, heading to the door. "And you still didn't move your shoes."

The phone buzzes again against Hill's hand. Cloak and dagger shit. Of course it's got to be Coulson. "Hill," she says, cautiously, looking around the room. There's no way the timing's an accident. She's been looking for a camera since the day she moved in, and she's been changing in the closet in the dark ever since.

(Morales just thinks she's paranoid, or thinks she just should quit if it bothers her so much. She knows there are worse things in life than creepy peepers surveilling on co-eds, especially if they're doing it to everybody equally, and one of the reasons she's here is to get away from them.)

"Congratulations!" Coulson's enthusiastic voice booms out of the cheap ear piece so loud it crackles. "You're an agent now! No more pencils, no more looks – "

"Lots of Fury's dirty looks, sir?"

"I figured that went one without saying, Hill. Listen, sorry about that whole blank envelope thing. We didn't really know where we were going to assign you until after the ceremony. We thought it was better to keep up appearances rather than have anybody asking questions."

"I was supposed to go to Logistics, sir."

"There were a couple of last-minute offers we had to consider before making our final judgment."

"'We', sir?"

"Yeah. You know, me, Swansson, a couple of other members of 'the gang'." Had she really handled Fury that badly? "Don't worry about it, agent. You've been singled out for much better things than spending your days in a New York cubicle, breathing exhaust every morning and spending two hours in traffic every night commuting to your apartment in Queens."

"Better things, sir?"

"Let me ask you a question. How do you feel about the tropics? You know, fun fun fun in the sun sun sun?"

"Do I have any choice at all, sir?"

There's a pause over the line that lasts about a second. "There's always a choice," says Coulson. "You could walk away right now. Go back to – what was it – packing groceries at the Fairplay?" She doesn't have anything to say to that, but she sweeps her eyes around the room, looking for bugs. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean the room isn't crawling with them. "Or you can get on the plane that's going to be taking off from Airstrip 2 in another hour. Agent Radley will be expecting you."

"Radley, sir?"

"Pack your suntan lotion and your bottled water, Agent Hill. You are going to Madripoor."

And he hangs up.

The son of a bitch.

* * *

_Coulson, Hill, Fury, and S.H.I.E.L.D. ©2014 (and points before and beyond) by Marvel._

_Quoted lyrics: "I Hope I Get It" from A Chorus Line; "Magic" by Pilot; "Float On" by Modest Mouse_


	2. Chapter 2

_Two: Tonight the Sky is Empty_

**Madripoor - November 2004**

She's dreaming of flying when a fist on the door crushes her wings and pulls her back to Earth.

"Hill." Radley's stern voice from the hallway.

"Sir." She blinks two or three times, staring up at the ceiling of the darkened break room from the couch. She runs a hand through her close-cropped hair which comes away wet. The humidity in the air's so thick she thinks she could cut slices off and toast them for breakfast. "What's the time?"

"Oh-two-thirty."

"I was off until oh-six-hundred, sir."

"Anonymous tipster," says Radley, his tone as close to apologetic as his serious demeanor ever allows. "Says there's an anthrax lab on one of the wrecks out in the harbor. Probably nothing, but O'Riordan and Sergeev still need a third. Suit up."

"You can't send Chang, sir?"

"I cannot, agent," says Radley. "She threw scissors. You shot paper in absentia." She can see his silhouette turn in the door and start walking away. "Boots down at oh-three-hundred."

She glances out the window, an inch-thick slab of bulletproofed glass and steel mesh, as she sits up. Nothing to see through the perimeter lights but rain slamming against the ground. She thought the equatorial sun was bad on its own. They've only gone three days in the last month without rain.

When she shuffles into the locker room, still bleary from her abortive nap, O'Riordan's already half into his riot gear and Sergeev's triple-checking his assault rifle. "You're going out four times in three days," says O'Riordan, continuing to fasten his bulletproof vest. "Trying to break your old record, are you, Hill?"

"You are very unlucky, Sorceress," Sergeev says, not bothering to look away from his examination of the rifle strap to greet her. "But perhaps your magic touch is the missing link of this assignment's great chain."

"Some magic," she says, pulling her locker door open. "I shot paper against Chang's scissors and I wasn't even there to lose in person."

"A better definition of the phrase I have never heard," adds Sergeev, sighting an imaginary round down the barrel.

"Never prepared you for this at the Academy, did they?" O'Riordan sets his helmet on his head. One of the demographically few black men from Northern Ireland, is O'Riordan, and a dedicated weightlifter whose forearms are about as thick as her thighs. "Mission assignments decided through games of chance?"

"They taught me protocol, sir," she says, tugging her tactical vest on over her sweat-stained tanktop. Vanity's the first thing she lost in Madripoor, sheared away with the hair she buzzed nearly to the scalp to ward off the tropic heat. "Then sent me someplace none of that matters. What are the odds this is a real tip?"

"What are the odds we'll find a unicorn chewing oats in the hold?" Sergeev, satisfied that the morbid state of his field equipment hasn't worsened since the last op, finally looks up.

"Shall we go find out, then," says O'Riordan, and slams his locker door.

On the way out, Hill pours a shot of rum into an empty glass sitting on a ledge under a picture of a balding secret agent, then turns out the lights.

Rick Stoner. The last S.H.I.E.L.D. officer who tried to improve Madripoor.

For his foolishness, in his honor, all field agents leave offerings to him before risky missions.

Some weeks, his picture drinks better than they do.

* * *

She can hear the monsoon-strength winds howling through the bulkhead, but she can't see through the sweat condensing in her goggles.

It's dark like a black hole below-decks. Humidity makes the simple act of walking down any of the many empty corridors feel like wading through a swamp with fifty pounds of ancient riot gear strapped to her body, and her goggles are fogged over and dripping wet.

There could be twenty hostiles, pointed and ready to shoot, lurking behind every cabin door.

There could be no living soul for half a mile in any direction.

There's definitely anthrax here. Or there was. A stack of empty glass trays, stained red from lamb's blood, that O'Riordan found in a converted cabin on deck two leave no doubt about that much.

Who cultivated it, and where it's been taken, are the questions meant to be answered by the last ninety minutes of crawling through every last black, rusting inch of this floating shitpile.

"Sorceress, Lazaro." The radio built into the helmet crackles after the transmission, a soothing burst of nerve-shredding white noise she briefly mistakes for a firing gun. She spins on her feet, panic making her light and lithe like the gymnast she once wanted to be, and settles only after she doesn't get shot. "Any news?"

"Sure," she says, aiming her light into what was probably a very serviceable middle class cabin forty years ago. "I can't see shit, Lazaro."

"That is not news," says Sergeev.

"We know she's not in the head, at least," says O'Riordan.

"I'm looking through sweat," she says, rounding a corner into what she assumes is another black, empty hallway. She can just about make out the blob of white light being cast by the flashlight taped to her rifle's barrel. If there's actually a firefight, even if she could see, the extra weight throws her aim enough she's probably dead. "If there's anybody looking to put an end to anyone anywhere around here, you can't prove it by me, sir."

"Copy, Sorceress."

"Have we located anything useful, Lazaro?" It's just her and the sound of her footsteps on this deck, the heavy clunk-clunk-clunk of her boots carrying her deeper into the dark.

"That's a big neg," O'Riordan says. "Decks three through five are clear."

"I have found something," says Sergeev from somewhere else on the boat.

"Found what, Nilo?"

"At first," he says, "I believed it to be my dick, as I found it with both hands and a flashlight. Upon closer examination, it turned out to be my rifle."

"If this was supposed to be an ambush," she says, "they're as lost as we are, Lazaro."

"No shit, Sorceress." O'Riordan sighs. "Probably one cell using us to hit the competition, except they called too late."

"I still can't see anything," she repeats, leaning against the half-open door to a rusted-out stateroom. "And I'm sweating my body weight into this vest."

"I'm calling it," says O'Riordan. "Sorceress, Nilo, get your arses back to deck one and prepare for extraction."

Outside, the sky's still black, and the rain still hammers, and the wind still tears.

And nobody dares take off their gear until they're locked into the armored truck. What they didn't find on the ship might still be waiting for them out in the night.

* * *

Unlike its neighbors in Singapore, Madripoor does not recognize English as an official language. The road signs, in those neighborhoods rich or organized enough to have road signs, are printed with a combination of Jawi script and hanzi logograms.

Hill can't read either one.

She hasn't driven in six months.

Sometimes, it's Chang, who's even more American than she is but managed to pick some things up along the way. More often, it's O'Riordan, who turns out to be fluent with hanzi because his mother was a U.N. translator, which sometimes took them a long way away from Northern Ireland. She thinks about telling him that her mother's people are from County Derry, sometimes.

But maybe he's fat lad instead of fat dad, so it's Londonderry to him, and if that's so he may regard the Beverlands of Dungiven as violent radicals who tried for long decades to tear his country apart.

"Radley calling Hill, over." The chief's grave voice coming out of the worn-down old police radio mounted to the vinyl dashboard with wood screws and duct tape.

"This is Hill, over," she says into the radio handset.

"Bad news, agent," says Radley. "You got a call."

"A call, sir?"

"Said he was one of your assets." There's a sound of rustling paper as Radley sorts through the massive mound of notes on his desk.

"I don't have any assets, sir."

"Asset Bambang," he says. "Called at oh-four-twenty, begging immediate assistance."

Bambang.

Bambang walked in off the street, cold, one month into her posting. She was still on the front desk because Radley hadn't cleared her for active field duty. Bambang had grown tired of the pirates ruling over his neighborhood with an iron fist, and decided it was time to push back.

She'd worked with him for two weeks, long days and hot under the turning ceiling fans to collate dossiers and mugshots into a workable file. At the end of it, she'd handed him off to Interpol's Singapore office because the Security Council was pretending piracy was somebody else's problem that month and Madripoor's not a place Interpol will keep an office.

She hasn't heard from him since.

"What sort of assistance, sir?" She glances at the green clock on the dashboard. 0445. Shit. O'Riordan, in the driver's seat, turns to look at her with a veteran field op's recognition that a long night just got longer.

"What sort of assistance are we usually called on to provide, Agent Hill?"

She sighs. "Did he say where we can find him, sir?"

More rustling paper. "The Lowlands."

"Shit," she says.

"Your call, agent," says Radley. "Your response. Over and out."

She replaces the handset and swears, a venomous hiss of profanity.

"To the Lowlands, Hill?"

Bambang only wants to make his home a little safer.

Shit.

"To the Lowlands, sir," she finally says.

* * *

Some places in Madripoor can't afford road signs. The Lowlands can't afford roads.

Built on the remains of a private beach reclaimed from the Strait of Malacca by a cocaine supplier with more vision than sight, the Lowlands are a warren of cramped, collapsing huts made out of flotsam and jetsam their owners scrounge out of the decades of wreckage littering the island.

There isn't power. There aren't lights. There aren't even the vague mockeries of utilities and services other parts of Madripoor claim to have. No police officer is caught dead here after sunset, or they're not caught alive anywhere else.

S.H.I.E.L.D. agents make runs into the Lowlands once a week, on average.

This is Hill's second trip since Friday, her first at night in three weeks. She puts her helmet on before they make the neighborhood's outer limits, and she keeps her sweating index finger on the rifle's trigger guard. On the not-so-off-hand chance somebody decides to take a shot at them, she wants to be ready.

"This is far as the SUV's going," says O'Riordan as they pull to a top where the cracked pavement gives way to unpaved mud.

"What are we to be looking for this time," Sergeev says.

"Bambang, I guess," says Hill. There's nothing out the windshield but rain and mud, and the cracked sides of swelling huts, illuminated white in the high beams. She opens her door and steps out.

"Michael, my friend," says Sergeev, unbuckling his seatbelt. "Do not stop the engine." He puts his riot helmet back on over his bald head and strokes his goatee before lowering the face shield. "We may have to bolt."

"Wouldn't dream of it, Nikolai," says O'Riordan. "Good luck. God bless."

"Sure," says Hill, and she slams her door. After a moment, Sergeev follows suit.

O'Riordan locks the doors, a small clicking sound nearly swallowed by the white noise hiss of the downpour.

"Which way, Sorceress?"

She looks around, not liking any direction, and turns her flashlight on. The beam's watery and weak, neither tested nor rated for this kind of weather, and she sweeps it across the buildings looking for anything which might be a sign of something. "This way, Nilo," she finally says, and begins trudging forward at random.

After what could be inches, feet, or meters of progress, she turns and looks back at the SUV. All she sees are two small white dots in the faraway darkness, and she knows they're alone.

* * *

"_Pejuang_," shouts a voice, broad and sarcastic, from somewhere in the invisible world surrounding them. Her boots are sticking in the inch-deep mud. She clicks her safety off. It's impossible to tell how long they've been walking, or where they've ended up. "_Pejuang, yang keluar dan bermain_!"

"Warriors," mutters Sergeev, translating, readying his own rifle. "Warriors, come out and play."

She prepares herself inwardly for the elevated-to-imminent probability bullets will start flying at any time, but she doesn't stop inching forward through the muck, one step at a time.

She can't, or she'll never be able to start again.

Nothing else happens.

Nobody else calls anything.

It's back to them, and the mud, and the rain, and the terrible effort to take a step through both under fifty pounds of riot gear which was already old when she was born.

And the anticipation of violence which may come in two seconds from any direction, or might just be a mind game played by the ganglords of the muck to keep amused on a night too unpleasant even for them to start something.

It's worse than the gunfight would be.

* * *

It's not until the sky lightens that they finally find Bambang, at the end of a long body-wide furrow torn into the mud at the farthest edge of the Lowlands.

He went down fighting, or it looks like he did.

He should have sworn his services to better kings, or taken his advice from better counselors.

She looks up to avoid having to look down at the body, and for the first time all night she's grateful for all the riot gear standing between her and a face full of steaming rain.

She looks over at Sergeev. Sergeev looks back at her. The decision is made in silence, and silent is how things remain all the way back home.

They wind up carrying what's left of Bambang all the way back to the SUV, rest him gently on a plastic bag in the back, drive off in silence. They can't leave him there. Nobody else will ever come this far to claim him.

The rain starts to taper off on the drive home.

They're pulling through the gates to the S.H.I.E.L.D. compound, past the poor children sleeping under cardboard on the sidewalk to be first in line for the morning's begging, when a muezzin two blocks over begins the call to fajr prayer.

0532, today.

Her first week in Madripoor, Hill couldn't sleep for hearing the adhan whenever she had the time to think about sleeping. Now, it's just more local color, and the branch office uses the adhan for timekeeping purposes because you can hear the call from anywhere in the city.

"Allahu akbar," the muezzin says, his voice rising and falling and doubling back on itself. The loudspeaker crackles. "Allahu akbar."

Sure, she thinks. Why not? Somebody has to be.

Nobody around here's up to the challenge.

She trudges back to the break room and lies down on the couch, Bambang's face behind her eyes, thinking there's no way she'll sleep right up to the point Steiner nudges her awake at 0700 from a dream of flying.

* * *

"And when," she hears Radley say as she approaches his office, voice loud without crossing the line into outright shouting, "does he say I can _stop_?"

Another male voice, vaguely familiar, responds just quietly enough to be inaudible from the bullpen.

"Five times in three days, agent," says Radley, and this time he is shouting. "Five times. Be six by the end of the day. We're not precision instruments out here, but we still need time to recharge."

Chang has her feet propped up on one of the bullpen's gunmetal grey desks. Steiner, a little redheaded German with a healthy interest in explosives and an unhealthy interest in the box of triggers she keeps under her cot in the barracks, sits at the next desk over.

They're taking turns bouncing a small red ball off the two-redesigns-out-of-date S.H.I.E.L.D. logo stenciled poorly onto one of the grey office walls.

"Eight-six," says Steiner, and passes the ball across the aisle to Chang's waiting hand.

Chang can hit the eagle's head nine times out of ten and it's on the complete other side of the room. "Hey, Hill," Chang says, and tosses the ball. This is the tenth time out of ten, and it bounces wild and smacks into a couch under the west window.

"Eight-six," says Steiner again. Chang stands to retrieve the ball. "The _ausländers_ have arrived, Maria."

"Be still my beating heart," Hill says. "What's it look like?"

"Couple of Albright boys," Chang says, bending at the waist. "They won't last the afternoon before running back to the helipad, begging Big Daddy Fury to fly them far away from here." She straightens, red ball in hand.

"Agent Hill," says Radley in the other room. "My office, please."

Chang chucks the ball at Steiner, who doesn't catch it so much as pluck it out of the air with a steady hand. Steiner tosses the ball at the eagle. A direct hit to the beak. "Eight-seven," she says.

"Good luck with that," says Chang.

"Thanks," says Hill, infusing it with as much scorn as she can muster.

Goddamn scissors.

* * *

Inside the office, Radley's seated behind the desk, his perennially worried eyes watching her entrance. "Agent Coulson, Agent Sitwell," he says. "Meet Agent Hill, one of my best and brightest."

Sitwell wears a cheap suit which fits poorly over his shoulders. He nods casually. Coulson still looks like Coulson. She suspects he'd look the same at the methodist church he probably goes to on Sundays, or if he were the last man alive, roaming a nuclear wasteland, foraging for water and canned meat from the bombed-out shells of grocery stores.

"Long time no see, Agent Hill," says Coulson cheerfully, extending a hand for her to shake. She keeps hers behind her back and bows her head, instead, acknowledgment of the fact that, as a Level 2, she's at least three ranks below everybody else in the room.

She appraises Sitwell again. Maybe just two ranks.

"How you holding up," continues Coulson.

"I've had better days, sir," she finally says.

"Hill's just being modest," says Radley, "to spare you the gory details. She had two actions before breakfast."

"Successful actions?" Sitwell sits forward in his chair, pushes his glasses up his nose with his middle finger.

"That depends, sir," she says. "_We_ didn't lose anybody."

Interpol's another story, and she has to remember to call them.

"So it's like a plane crash," says Sitwell. "It's a success so long as you walk away from it."

"I think that's landings, Jasper," says Coulson.

"It applies either way."

Hill says nothing at all.

"Why don't you have a seat," says Radley.

"So," says Coulson as she does. "You're probably wondering why we're here."

"Not really, sir. He's supposed to update the data entry system."

"That covers Agent Sitwell, then. Why am I here?"

"I have a few theories about that, sir."

"I'm sure you do," says Coulson. "Chief Radley here tells me that since you were assigned here, you've helped smash Roche's operations and even taken out the Clan of the… Black Blade?" He turns his head to look at the thin, dark-headed supervisor. "Is that actually their name?"

"A lot of the gangs around here," says Radley, "like their names to be more decorative."

"Seriously, though. The Clan of the Black Blade?"

"Yes, sir," says Hill.

"That's kind of awesome. Don't you think that's awesome, Jasper?"

"I've heard worse gang names," says Sitwell.

"So, how did you take them out?"

"I didn't, sir." She breathes in. She meets Coulson's level gaze. "It was a marginal disruption, at best. Two American women in a bar down the wharf started a punch-up with what turned out to be a Black Blade enforcer. We were there to mop it up."

"'We,' Agent Hill?"

"Agent Steiner and myself, sir."

"There's got to be more to that story than that," says Sitwell. "I've seen the report. It was, like, an inch thick. With footnotes."

"The enforcer was wearing silver armor," she says, "and the bar almost burned down."

"Huh. Is that normal?"

"Around here, sir, it's not totally _ab_normal."

"Sounds exciting," says Coulson, and he closes the manila folder he's been reading out of. "Why don't we go get something to eat? You know, have Agent Hill here take us out to get painted by some of that local color?" Radley and Hill exchange a look. "What?"

"I'm going to pass, Agent Coulson," says Radley, "but you go right ahead. Agent Hill?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Why don't you bring Agent O'Riordan along on this one?"

"Yes, sir."

"Dismissed."

As she's walking out of the room, she hears Radley explaining to Coulson that in Madripoor, it's always at least two agents out at a time. No exceptions.

She finds O'Riordan in the locker room, sitting in front of his locker, contemplating the scratch marks on his helmet with a rag and some polish.

As they leave, she taps the photo of Stoner on the wall for luck.

* * *

It's a few degrees cooler outside today, and since dawn the sun's been making a politician's promise to step out from behind the clouds. So they sit outside of a bánh mì place on the edge of the good part of town which affords a first-class view of Madripoor's most popular and beloved employment destination, a towering mound of girders and drywall gradually stretching towards the heavens.

"The Hotel Sovereign," says Hill like it's a joke. She takes a bite of her lunch, chews it with quick and precise bites like she's trying to minimize contact with her taste buds.

She and O'Riordan sit with their backs to the restaurant wall, just like any agent who's spent longer than six hours on the island.

"Is that supposed to be funny?"

"Just a little bit, sir," she says.

"We're all agents here, Hill," says Coulson. "You can call me Phil."

"Some gangster read an architectural magazine and got a raging case of wallet envy, sir. So now he's building a hundred-floor luxury hotel in the middle of the poorest country in Asia."

"Work's so hard to come by," adds O'Riordan, "people kill each other for spots on the construction crews. And there aren't any safeguards, so once every couple of weeks, you hear about somebody else falling off a beam on the upper levels."

"What's in this sandwich?" Sitwell's spreading the baguette apart and poking at the chunks of meat he's already bitten into. She glares at the top of his head for the change in subject. "It does not taste right."

"Do you really want to know, Agent Sitwell?"

"I ordered what you ordered, Agent Hill," he says. "You looked like you knew what you were doing. I think I'm entitled to know what I paid for."

"It's probably rat," says Hill. She takes another bite, cocks an eyebrow at him over the table as she chews. "Today, anyway."

"Probably?" Sitwell looks green. She swallows. "Is she kidding, Phil?"

"Agent Hill doesn't have any sense of humor I'm aware of, Jasper."

"It's not stringy like cat. Other than that, I can't tell you for sure what it might be, sir," she says.

"You've eaten _cat_?"

"After a couple of weeks here, you eat a lot of things, sir."

"You just take the protein and hope whatever's on the plate doesn't give you food poisoning," says O'Riordan.

"We don't get paid enough to eat at any restaurant which can afford real meat," says Hill. "Sir."

"What do you plan to do for Thanksgiving," asks Sitwell with what seems like uncharacteristically sincere curiosity.

"If we're lucky," says O'Riordan, "eat more rat."

"And that would be why I'm just drinking a bottled Coke," says Coulson, taking a sip for emphasis. "You can't go wrong with Coca-Cola."

"And how much did the Coke cost you, sir?"

"You can go wrong if you have an ulcer," says Sitwell. "That happened to a friend of mine back at Communications. Drank a whole can of Coke. Spent two days in the hospital."

"Why'd he do a thing like that?" Coulson drinks from his bottle again.

"I bet him twenty bucks he wouldn't."

* * *

As her visiting colleagues debate frat-boy stupidity, Hill keeps an eye on the people walking along the sidewalk.

A scrawny old woman, face like tree bark. Burqa flapping in the stiff wind which heralds the return of monsoon rains later that afternoon.

On an island of three million people, the chance any individual person falls victim to violent crime is microscopic, even if the island's Madripoor. Millions of these people are honest. They work for pennies on the dollar, bring bread and meager produce home for spouses and children, and live clean, law-abiding lives.

Two small boys running in circles around a man's legs. He chastises them in what seems to be Malay with what sounds like affection. Maybe a father. Maybe not. Using kids isn't unheard of, but it's been known to paint a target on your head, so most groups avoid it.

Violent crime happens anyway. Piracy by every dictionary definition of the phrase. Terrorist groups climbing over each other's failed doctrines to reach for the stars. Kidnapping for profit's gone out of favor as visitors with enough money to be worthwhile ransoms stop coming to Madripoor, but it's still a popular pastime among broke-down losers taking their first tentative steps into criminal enterprise.

A woman pushing a baby carriage. She bends over and baby-talks to the infant within in what sounds, at this distance and to Hill's mostly-untrained ear, like Mandarin Chinese.

Her second week here, a bomb in a baby carriage cleared out the tent city by the wharf. She and Steiner spent three hours crawling over ground zero, looking for bomb fragments between big wreckage and blown-wide body parts.

An old man, thinned-out hair the dirty white of a used paper towel, taps down the broken sidewalk with a cane.

She doubts you can forget the smell of congealing blood baking under a tropical sun, but she spent hours in the barracks testing the hypothesis, anyway, drinking shot after shot after shot of cheap rum with Steiner until they both passed out. (It didn't work, but it was worth the effort.)

A young woman, soft face prematurely old, in a filthy shawl. She walks, with utmost public propriety, just a few steps behind a similarly young-old man dressed in rags.

"What do you think about _that_, Hill?" Sitwell's voice brings her back to the table. "Hill?"

"This is ground control to Agent Hill," says Coulson.

"Sorry, sir," she says. "Just thinking."

"I guess that would explain the smoke," says O'Riordan as a truck backfires on a nearby street.

There's a frantic metallic scramble as all four duck and draw their firearms in accordance with careful years of training.

They don't relax until they see the old truck - how did a '71 Chevrolet Blazer make it so far, and how is it still running despite the rust? - round the corner, oozing smoke into the air like the pus from an infected wound.

* * *

On the drive back to the compound, Coulson's Coca-Cola finally demonstrates how wrong it can go, and they wind up pulling over on an empty stretch of road halfway between the lowlands and the city so he can relieve himself into the weeds. O'Riordan sticks with him.

Two at a time. Nobody left alone.

O'Riordan's attempts to restart the engine after the unscheduled pit stop prove to be somewhat less than effective. Shooting rock against his paper, Hill ducks her head under the car long enough to confirm the thing's leaking enough oil onto the cracked road they could practically give those oil-spilling pricks at Roxxon a run for their money.

She can hear the muezzin, out in the distance, beginning to call the ẓuhr prayer.

1252.

_Allahu akbar._

Sitwell takes her aside while Coulson places a call to base asking for a pick-up, bringing her around to the other side of the vehicle.

"What do you _actually_ do here, Agent Hill?" Sitwell's face shines with sweat under the tropical sun. She'd warn him to rub some lotion on, but the idea of him returning to civilization sunburned to the color of a boiled beet is amusing enough she decides to keep her mouth shut about it.

"As little as possible, Agent Sitwell," she says.

"This section's had more than six strike team operations in the last week," he says. "You've been on all of them. That's not exactly 'little'." He pauses. "And it's pretty impressive."

He technically outranks her. She has to choose her words carefully. "'As possible' being the operative term," she finally says. "If we get a tip somebody's cooking up doomsday-grade anthrax in a freighter, obviously we need to respond." They often don't, of course, but he's an outsider.

He doesn't get to know that.

"Is that likely to happen?"

"It already did, sir," she says.

Sitwell watches her for a second. "_Were_ they?"

"We found six empty trays, sir."

He looks at her for a second over the rim of his round glasses. She, unaccountably, wants to break them over his head. "And the anthrax?"

"Was already gone when we'd arrived, sir."

_Hayya ʿala ṣ-ṣsalāt._

Sitwell looks like he has something he wants to say to that.

But then there's a crack, loud but not loud enough, nastier than anybody supposes from years of exposure to Hollywood sound effects.

Something falls.

She hears it hit the ground.

She tries to turn around to look but there's a light in her - no, not a light, a thing. A feeling. Something hot and white which has burned a hole in her back and is blooming, bright and fierce, in her stomach.

She tries to breathe.

She coughs, blood spraying out of her mouth onto Sitwell's suit and she _hurts_ from her ribcage to her hipbones. It feels like something's ripped inside her. She's on her feet just long enough to see his round face go from indifference to surprise before her legs drop out and she's on her back on a broken sidewalk, staring up at the bright, cloudy sky.

Cracking.

Cordite stink.

Shouting.

"Agent down! Agent down!"

Hands pull at her.

Her back aches where it slides along the broken asphalt.

Something wet and warm under the back of her head.

"Oh, God," somebody says in the accent of her mother's people.

"What happened?"

"Hang on, Hill," says the first one.

"She got hit."

She should know them, she really should, she should be concerned about the fact she doesn't or the way she's shivering in the middle of tropical humidity.

But right now she's only sixteen, sitting cross-legged in the grass with Fiona Brennan and Tommy Collins, watching the city celebrate America's independence by blowing up pounds of gunpowder in the sky over Lake Michigan.

Looking up at all the reds and golds and greens which sparkle against the purple-and-orange Chicago night.

It's a good night.

It's worth waiting for The Bastard to check on her, worth listening to him lock her bedroom door to make sure God's Little Abomination couldn't sneak out the front and do anything to jeopardize her begging God for mercy at mass the next morning.

Worth shimmying down the drainpipe, sneaking through the shadows, dashing to the El on Halsted to just barely catch the last train before the display begins.

Even, maybe especially, worth the clumsy teenage kiss she gives Tommy after the show, neither knowing quite how to angle her nose or how open her mouth should be. The way he looks at her after, like she's made of something better than flesh, like she hasn't just grown long and lean but also wide in all the right places?

That look is hers, and she put it on his face, and she'll do it all over again, again and again and again, if only she can.

What a waste of a good memory, she thinks, dimly, back in the present as quickly as she'd left it, hearing the on-going crack-crack-crack of automatic weapons and a distant ringing in her ears.

Why, why now, why is this what I'm thinking of when I'm -

* * *

She has, she thinks, three nurses.

Nurse Anong comes in the morning. Forties. Round. Barely speaks a word of English, which makes her a less than ideal aid companion for a woman who can't speak whatever her language is and isn't in her right mind half the time.

Nurse Mongkut takes the evenings. Twenties. Skinny. Always smiling. He speaks a lot of English, not always correctly, similes and metaphors tripping over each other in colorful and inventive ways.

Her favorite nurse, by far, is the 7.5/500mg tablet of percocet they let her swallow with a sip of water every six hours. _She_ makes the red glowing gridlines of pain across Hill's midsection fade to a pale yellow, and draws the warm fog around her like a soft old afghan, and sings to Hill until she sleeps.

Sleeps, and dreams sometimes of visitors.

People she knows from... somewhere. It starts with an M. Mort - no, Mont - no, something.

"You are very lucky, Maria Hill," says one of them, the wiry bald man with the goatee, his hand squeezing the bed's rail so hard the metal creaks. "I think maybe you really must be a Sorceress, no?"

"The warriors came out to play," says one of them, the tall black man with arms like girders.

"They'll never do this again," says a little redhead grimly.

Her favorite nurse makes her gentle rounds.

She slips away into the space between the dreams again.

And once, there's a bald black man with an eyepatch standing silent in the doorway, and when she blinks, he's turned into Nurse Mongkut, smiling again, saying, "Hello, Hill, ready to take your pills like your medicine" in a cheery tone.

And one night, there's her mother, perched by the side of the bed in a plain nightgown Hill had never seen her wear in life. "It's just a door, _muirnin_," she says in a soft lilt Hill had never heard with her own ears, hand just as gentle against her daughter's wet throat. "It's no trouble at all to walk through."

And then there's a beeping at the edge of her hearing.

When Hill wakes up again, there's warm sun shining through the window and a couple of doctors at the foot of her bed, talking amongst themselves gravely in Thai.

After that, there's no more percocet.

* * *

Another day, Coulson sits in a chair by her bed, having a conversation with the air. "Two gangs down in six months, and not so much as a scratch on her until this," he says, low but vehement. "I don't know what else you could possibly want out of this, sir"

"Hello, Phil," she says, loosely.

"Hey, welcome back to the land of the living!" Coulson presses a button on the plastic rectangle in his hand. "At least now we know what it takes to make you use my first name," he says, setting it down on the bedside tray next to a small square wrapped in silver paper. "You know, like normal colleagues do."

"Where am I?"

"Bangkok," he says after a slight delay. She watches him feel his way through proper responses. "You're in Bangkok."

"That's not in Madripoor," she says.

"You noticed that, huh?" He leans forward in the chair, puts an arm on the bed's rail. "They always said you were observant. What do they have you on right now?"

"It starts with a… um… a T?"

"You don't know."

"I liked the other stuff," she says. "I slept a lot. Hospitals are boring."

"I heard you slept a little too much," says Coulson. "Oh, I bought you a little get-well-soon present." He taps the package on the tray. "You probably shouldn't open it yet. I don't think there's anything here you can play it with."

"Is it nice?"

"Well, I hope so," says Coulson. "You're a hard woman to shop for, by the way. I asked around. About all anybody could tell me is that you like musicals. And since you're from Chicago, I thought, you know, I'll get you _that_ one."

"I already have three copies," she says. "But that's nice. That's just really nice of you. That's what that is."

"Can I get you anything? You want some water?"

She shakes her head. "They said I can't have children anymore," she says brightly. "That they had to remove my… uh… you know, that thing. With the babies."

"That's right," he says after a longer pause. "They had to give you a complete hysterectomy, too." He's got a serious look now, and frankly, she doesn't really know why.

"This medicine's great," she says. "I don't feel anything."

"You might want to put a pin in that," he says, "and come back to it once they've tapered you off. You might be surprised how much you'll feel."

"I don't know what that means," she says. "Was it really bad, Phil?"

"I've seen worse," he says after the longest pause yet. She turns it around in her head a few times, but she can't figure out why that's important. The fog's creeping over the land, and soon, it will cover the lighthouse.

It comes to her suddenly that Phil's been talking for a while, and she hasn't heard a thing he's said, and she thinks that's bad, so she really makes an effort to concentrate on him. "The important thing is," he's saying, "that you're alive now. And you can go home soon. You won't have to go back to Madripoor unless you really, really want to."

"That's good," she says. "I didn't like Madripoor. Hey, Phil?"

"What is it, Maria?"

"I think I'm peeing, Phil," she says, drowsy and slow now, like she doesn't really know what the words she's saying mean.

Coulson glances down at the sheet draped over her legs, then back up at her face. "Well," he says, "you've probably got a catheter to take care of that for you. And if not, you still won't have to clean the mess up. That's what we call a win-win situation. More good news, the surgeon says they'll be able to take the, uh, ileostomy bag away in a couple of weeks."

"That's nice." She yawns. "I'm going sleep now, Phil."

Coulson's quiet again. "Sounds like a good idea."

"Thank you for thing," she says, slurring the words.

The last thing she feels before unconsciousness is his hand on her forehead, and she thinks, dad cared enough to visit after all.

* * *

_Hill, Coulson, Fury, Sitwell, S.H.I.E.L.D., Madripoor, and Steiner ©2014 (and points before and beyond) by Marvel._

_Adhan text was copied from the Wikipedia article. "Pejuang, yang keluar dan bermain!" is an internet translation of "Warriors, come out and play" from English into Indonesian. If either – or both – of these are wrong, let me know the correct versions and I'll edit accordingly._


End file.
